Also available in The Billy Wilder Collection Boxed set (129.96), with The Apartment,
Avanti!, The Fortune Cookie, Irma La Douce, Kiss Me Stupid, One Two Three, Some Like it Hot and
Witness for the Prosecution.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

When Filmex held its big Billy Wilder marathon in 1972, they showed several of his (at the
time) harder-to-see pictures, like Emil and the Detectives and Ball of Fire.
They also showed The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which was then only two years old
but already just as obscure. Like Stanley Donen's Bedazzled and Arthur Penn's Night
Moves, Sherlock became well-known as a flop that everyone liked. It played constantly
in revival houses, and gained a reputation not only for its funny script and Miklos Rosza's
romantic score, but for the rumor that the released version had been cut by almost a third. Its production
history makes the film sound as if it should be a disaster, but it's not at all.

Synopsis:

When there's not a pending case for the great consulting detective Sherlock Holmes
(Robert Stephens) to solve and his associate Doctor Watson (Colin Blakely) to fictionalize for The
Strand magazine, they bicker incessantly. A wily Russian opera manager (Clive Revill) tries to buy
Holmes' services as a stud for retiring ballerina Madame Petrova (Tamara Toumanova). Sherlock slips
out of the deal by telling a lie that gets him into trouble with Watson. Then, amnesiac Belgian
mystery woman Gabrielle Valldon (Geneviève Page) turns up at their door, launching the
pair into a complicated case involving kidnapped scientists, dead canaries, Trappist monks and
Holmes' brother Mycroft (Christopher Lee), a spymaster for the foreign office. Sherlock, Watson
and Gabrielle take the train to Scotland to find the source of the mystery, which proves to be
almost too much for the brilliant sleuth.

In the latter half of the 60s, Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond found themselves struggling. The
Fortune Cookie had been a commercial success, but the changing landscape of feature films and
public taste threatened their commitment to classically-designed comedy. The pair embarked on a
massive roadshow production that, with endless casting, took four years to bring to the screen. It
was finally finished just as a series of costly flop roadshow pictures was bankrupting Hollywood.
Suddenly United Artists was no longer keen on releasing a three hour movie about 1880s England, with
no big stars.

Billy Wilder wasn't forced to cut Sherlock Holmes; he himself had become disenchanted with
his movie, feeling that he still hadn't cast the main role correctly. The movie was once divided
into 4 adventures, three short ones and one lengthier one. Two of adventures were simply dropped,
with a more elaborate opening, and a crucial flashback also trimmed away. The film as released is not some
butcher job, but his final approved version. (more on the cut scenes below)

Robert Stephens went against the 1970 image of Sherlock, which was still dominated by Basil Rathbone's
pictures from 30 years before.
Stephens was more like a true prudish-and-proper London gentleman, trading witty vaudeville
routines ("Dust, Mrs. Hudson, is an essential part of my filing system!") with Colin Blakely's wonderfully
genial Watson. Typically ahead of so-called permissive trends, Wilder and Diamond's hard look at the
Doyle character finally addresses the fact that Holmes doesn't seem to have a love life. One of
the lost, cut episodes seeks to explain his acute distrust of women; in the shorter released version
the revisionist writers dance around the possibility that Holmes might be gay.

Wilder has always been an adult filmmaker, and after decades of winking at the audience with edgy
jokes, he'd just gone through a string of increasingly ribald pictures, one of which hit such a raw
nerve with the Catholics and the production code, that UA had to release it out the side door, through
an affiliate distributor. Their Sherlock Holmes was more sophisticated, unlike like the
new, post-Valenti
big-studio exploitation - Myra Breckinridge, The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart.
The nudity was nominal, and the sex-related humor all verbal. Unfortunately, the picture was
sold as if it were something shocking - I read an article in the short-lived Show magazine
entitled The Private Sex Life of Sherlock Holmes. The family trade stayed home.

In The Singular Affair of the Russian Ballerina, the question of Holmes' sexuality is a joke:
" ... Caprice of Mother Nature"; "So there'll be a little gossip about you in St. Petersburg ..." But
the detective cagily refuses a direct demand for the truth from Watson. But Holmes always thwarts
Watson's attempts to peg him on any issue. Holmes is obviously attracted to Gabrielle Valladon,
but he doesn't trust her,
for the wrong reasons, as it turns out. Holmes' habit of cautiously recoiling from the beguiling
Valladon makes him seem strangely ineffectual and vulnerable, even when professing total confidence
in himself. One critic compared Robert Stephens' moody inertia to Greta Garbo. Wilder's Holmes is
a disillusioned romantic, an intellect who retreats defensively to a position of asexuality.

The final The Adventure of the Dumbfounded Detective completely overturns the Holmes mythos,
subtly rethinking the character as A.I. Bezzerides had done to Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer in
Kiss Me Deadly. (spoiler) Like Bezzerides'
Hammer, Wilder's Holmes also fumbles his big case, because what he takes for one of his Victorian parlor
crimes, is really the beginning of a new era of international espionage. Holmes fails, but his
romantic foe Ilsa Von Hoffmanstahl never knows it, for he's too cowardly to admit he was fooled
by love. The romance of his life moves in a futuristic world where treachery is commonplace, where
he doesn't fit in. Master spy Ilsa is never going to be content knitting by a fire while Sherlock
smokes his pipe. The final bittersweet revelation is a shock that indeed does send Holmes running
to his seven-percent solution of cocaine.

Viewers who haven't seen The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes are in for a big surprise, for it
is a loving valentine to old-fashioned moviemaking. The photography of the lush Scottish landscape
is beautiful, and the scenes backstage at the ballet are a riot of soft colors and balalaika music.
The script is a witty delight, with Wilder and Diamond decorating their mystery plot with a constant
stream of arcane clues and character-driven jokes.

Well-known now from
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Robert Stephens played mostly character parts in films as diverse as
Cleopatra,, Travels with My Aunt, and
The Asphyx. He may not be a bankable star
as Wilder's first choice Peter O'Toole, but he's excellent in the role. Colin Blakely is the
comedic dynamo who makes the jokes sparkle and the period farce work ("Holmes! You cad!").
Genevieve Page - at 40 - is a credible, sexy damsel in distress. In lively bits are Clive Revill
(Avanti!) as a finicky Russian ("Madame
has read every story - her favorite is Beeg Dog from Baskairveel"), Irene Handl as the
patient landlady of 221B Baker Street, and horror star Christopher Lee in his breakout role, perfectly
cast as the insufferably pompous Mycroft.

None of these talents measured up to the All-Youth demands of the 1970 distributors, and after numerous
production problems - including 47 extra shooting days due to Stephens' illnesses - this
borderline masterpiece was simply dumped with a campaign that appealed to nobody. It's a shame
that Wilder lost faith in his own film, and that United Artists didn't come up with some
kind of clever, compensating marketing gambit with which to spring it on the public. Even in this
shortened form, it's a movie gem hiding in plain sight. 1

MGM's hotly-awaited DVD of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes isn't as dazzling as it should
be. It's perfectly acceptable in general terms - the jokes certainly aren't any less funny - but it
can't touch the memory of the beautiful theatrical prints. The transfer is from an element with
colors that are always slightly 'off'. The opening reels tend to be reddish. The biggest casualty is
the ballet scene, which was stylized with beautiful hazy pastels, that now seem ordinary.
Finally, many darker scenes have film-sourced halation effects in the blacks, a problem more often found in
bad prints of much older films. It's very distracting.

The extras on this disc center on the famous unreleased roadshow version. In the early 90s, Image and MGM
released a laserdisc that had the two major missing scenes, but only parts of them: The Curious
Case of the
Upside-Down Room, a comic attempt by Watson to cheer up his bored friend, was audio-only; and
The Dreadful Business of the Naked Honeymooners, where Watson takes a turn at playing detective, was
picture-only. The laser played an interview over the audio track of one, while subtitling the other.

There were other alterations for which no film survived. The lost opening had Watson's grandson
claiming the box of precious artifacts left in charge of bank manager John Williams. A key
flashback on the train to Inverness told the story of the collegiate Sherlock's encounter with
a dream-girl sweetheart - who turned out to be a prostitute and warped his perception of women forever.
These were barely covered on the laser, but the DVD uses script excerpts and some newly-found stills
from the AMPAS ... although photos for the prostitute scene are still very thin. Robert
Stephens at age 19 has the same problem his wife Maggie Smith had two years later in the flashbacks in
Travels With My Aunt - he can't possibly look young enough.

Some of the text accompanying and explaining the lost version seem to be 'borrowed' from the Sergio Leeman
liner notes from the old laser. There's an interview with the editor of the film, Ernest Walter,
taken from the laserdisc. Holders of the laser might want to hang onto it, because there's some
incidental nudity in one of the recovered scenes that MGM has this time chosen to digitally blur. The
DVD department has a rule not to show any nudity in added value material unless a waiver is obtained
from the actor involved.

Christopher Lee is interviewed for this disc, and he covers his brief participation in the
film very quickly, giving thanks again to Wilder. Then he drones on forever about the Doyle
character and his personal appearances in Sherlock Holmes films. Lee can be a charming interview
subject (see Anchor Bay's
The Three Musketeers), but fan-oriented
interviewers repeatedly allow him to wear out his welcome.

The old laser also has a discrete music track for Miklos Rosza's score. I received a letter claiming
that the new DVD should have had the laser disc's stereo track. My copy of the laser has the mono
mix on the left linear and digital channels, and the stand-alone mono music on the right linear and
digital channels. I'm also informed that there is at present no stereo music master for the film, which
explains the non-appearance of a soundtrack album. It certainly is one beautiful score.

The package illustration is not only tacky (Stephens' head is pasted onto a weirdly-angled silhouetted
figure) but totally misleading. Colin Blakely glares soberly from an inset photo. Anyone buying this
disc based on the cover art, won't be expecting a comedy.

1.Perhaps it would have been
a longshot,
but my brilliant idea was to turn one or both of the lengthier cut episodes, into television specials
that would help re-introduce the character of Sherlock Holmes to 1970 audiences spoiled by James Bond.
Along with a lot of hype
for the film, each special would have had its own self-contained comic mini-mystery. Frankly, although
it's all very funny, a Private Life of Sherlock Holmes an hour longer than it is now, might
have seemed to go on forever.Return